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Where is the plan to replace disappearing treatment for mentally ill prisoners?

The Harper government will close Kingston Penitentiary, the country's oldest penal institution, as part of a cost-cutting effort. Unfortunately, that also means closing the treatment centre within the penitentiary for 140 mentally ill offenders. There's no word on where those prisoners will go. (Lars Hagberg / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

Fri., April 27, 2012

Kingston Penitentiary was built before Canada was even a country. It’s a 19th-century nightmare known for housing many of Canada’s most notorious criminals. By any standard — prisoner accommodation to guard safety — its best-before date is long past.

On those grounds, the government’s decision to shutter Kingston, along with a prison in Quebec, was broadly welcomed. But that was not all that Public Safety Minister Vic Toews announced.

We’ll set aside, for now, Toews’ mathematically-challenged assertion that these prisons can close because the raft of legislation designed to put more people behind bars for longer has not swelled prison populations. The considerable, and largely overlooked, problem with this plan is that it will also close the Regional Treatment Centre, located inside the Kingston Penitentiary grounds.

That psychiatric facility can accommodate 140 profoundly mentally ill offenders. It is nearly always full, as are four similar facilities across Canada. More than 60 per cent of the treatment centre’s current inmates are serving life sentences. Just where will they go?

And yet the government has announced no such plans. There are plans for numerous prison expansions across the country, but none, says Sapers, are the required psychiatric treatment spaces. That makes Toews’ two-year timeline for closing these prisons incredibly ambitious or downright suspect.

If the minister thinks he can somehow sprinkle these very ill men in prison segregation cells (assuming he could find any empty ones) and call it a day, he had better brush up on his reading of the legislation that governs the operation of Canada’s prisons.

The corrections service must “provide every inmate with essential health care” and that care must “conform to professionally accepted standards.” In short, the government has a legal obligation not just to lock up these mentally ill offenders but to provide for their health needs as well.

The corrections system is already failing badly on that score. More than 10 per cent of federal male prisoners and as many as 20 per cent of female ones have a serious mental disorder, according to Sapers. Each year the numbers grow, as do the severity of the conditions.

Sapers has long been warning that the failure to properly treat many of these mentally ill offenders results in increased dangers for prisoners and guards and a rise in the unacceptable practice of leaving prisoners in segregation cells, with no human contact, for up to 23 hours a day.

And that’s all before this latest decision to close one of the largest specialized facilities in the country. How bad will things get once that’s gone?

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